Storytelling and Sport

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is about telling great, factual stories within the realm of human endeavor we call sport. That is, you will read and write substantial nonfiction narratives, and your main subject of inquiry will be near-at-hand happenings in sport, play, and performance. You can call it longform sportswriting, literary journalism, creative nonfiction, or anything in between—and, indeed, this course will ask you to interrogate the boundaries between subgenres in the literature of fact. Through your ethical efforts in research, exploration, and storytelling, you will seek to define and describe real-world truth through the art of the longform essay. With guidance, you will look for potential stories locally—on campus, or nearby—request access and permission to tell those stories, and gather material en route to crafting meaningful narratives. Together, we will ask fundamental questions about the time-honored act of storytelling and explore the history of the "longform" narrative form. What impact—culturally, socially, politically—can a well-told story have? We will build personal toolkits for writing nonfiction while reading and discussing exemplary essays. We will ask big questions about the role of sport and play in culture, mindful of local significance: What is the relationship between play and identity, for instance? How do conceptions of race, class, or gender find expression (or deconstruction) in sport? How does socioeconomic division affect access to sport and play in America? Most fundamentally, in this course, we will write and share our work with others. This course requires the completion of a substantial writing project, among other assignments, and you should be prepared to spend time with real people and your writing subjects outside of class time, and often according to their schedules.